Daily Digest 6/28 – When Money Is Worthless, What Life Without Retirement Savings Looks Like

by DailyDigest

Economy

Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas Hardiman are widely believed to be on the president’s short list, multiple sources told NBC News. Kavanaugh is a federal appeals court judge in Maryland and a former Kennedy clerk. Hardiman, a Pennsylvania federal judge, was a finalist the last go-round.

Because of AT&T’s position as one of the U.S.’s leading telecommunications companies, it has a large network that is frequently used by other providers to transport their customers’ data. Companies that “peer” with AT&T include the American telecommunications giants Sprint, Cogent Communications, and Level 3, as well as foreign companies such as Sweden’s Telia, India’s Tata Communications, Italy’s Telecom Italia, and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom.

The Lifeline was only allowed to dock in Malta after intense diplomacy among several EU states, who each agreed to take a share of the migrants on board. Malta said that Norway had now also agreed to take some migrants from the Lifeline.

So now, at 76, she earns $915 a month through Social Security and through Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, a program for low-income seniors. Her rent, which she has had to cover solo since her roommate died in August, is $1,040 a month. She’s been taking on credit-card debt to cover the gap, and to pay for utilities, food, and other essentials. She often goes to a church food bank for supplies.

The bill was finally approved after months of debate. The legislation will translate thousands of pieces of EU law into British statute. Pro-EU lawmakers and members of the House of Lords tried to amend it to soften the terms of Britain’s departure from the bloc.

Canadian Legalization looms July 1, and the cyclical rallies in the Precious Metals and Miners sectors, coming “about” six (6) months apart, generally Jan and Jul. Now, simply, the basic meme is “BUY The RUMOR”, and “SELL The NEWS” ( the obvious announcement concerning the Rumor). So with the Cannabis industry expanding like a bucket of water spilled on a tile floor, there is a time to beware of The DRAIN, where some of the companies disappear. Not all bad though, many will be absorbed by the bigger plays, that were investments for the “early adaptors”, and now provide buyouts for the smaller players.

Enrollees who qualify for premium subsidies — which are separate and unaffected — won’t have to pay much more, though they may need to switch plans to keep their rates steady. But middle class Americans who earn too much to get premium subsidies could get walloped by higher rates.

“We spend a lot of time talking about China and their 400 [million] tons,” Timken said. “But you also have to recognize there are another 300 [million] tons in the rest of the world that are targeting a market that is only 94 million tons.” (Editor’s note: After this article was published, Tim Timken contacted CNBC to say he had misstated the numbers of tons during the interview. The numbers in this quote have been corrected.)

“That being said, we found that even though the average has met and exceeded the objective or the goal, there are differences,” said Tainya Clarke, a health statistician and epidemiologist with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics and one of the authors of the report. “There are differences at the state level, and there are differences by some sociodemographic factors.”

The history of crude oil shows prices are erratic. Wars, news, shortages, surpluses, recessions and other factors boost or suppress short-term prices. But in the long term, crude oil prices rise because our economic system—government deficit spending, fractional reserve banking and central banks—devalue fiat currencies and cause commodity prices to rise, along with stocks, gold, salaries, political payoffs, cigarettes and the cost of wars.

How this plan fits into the latest OPEC+ deal remains to be seen. It was only a few days ago that Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners said that they would add 1 mb/d of supply back onto the market, with many of them acknowledging that, in reality, the figures would be closer to 600,000 bpd because of the inability of so many producers to ratchet up output.

On ice-covered Antarctica, the average temperature during the dark winter months is around minus 30 degrees F (minus 34.4 degrees C). For the new study, scientists analyzed data collected during July and August between 2004 and 2016. The temperatures were measured in small basins of the East Antarctic Plateau near the South Pole, at an elevation of 12,467 feet (3,800 meters), the highest part of the ice sheet.The new, record-breaking temperatures were widespread, appearing at 100 locations in depressions dotting “a broad region” of the plateau, the study authors reported.

Gold & Silver

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Re: Tariffs ‘absolutely will’ bring back jobs to America: Steel

Sorry not buying it:
1. For every one job created, 2 to 5 construction/mfg jobs will be lost due to the higher material costs.Most USA steel plants are high automated, so the number of new hires is going to be limited.
2. Millennials don't do industrial/Factory jobs. US companies would have to hire workers from China & India to work in their USA plants.
A Steel company CEO will of course argue in favor of tariffs, so US steel companies can increase prices. Already steel prices have increased. History shows that Tariffs never helped jobs, in some instances they have triggered recessions & depressions.

Crystallizing Public Opinion

During the First World War, Bernays served as a foot soldier for the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the vast American propaganda machine mobilized in 1917 to package, advertise and sell the war as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy.

In the twenties, Bernays fathered the link between corporate sales campaigns and popular social causes, when—while working for the American Tobacco Company—he persuaded women’s rights marchers in New York City to hold up Lucky Strike cigarettes as symbolic “Torches of Freedom.”

Several noteworthy points.

1) The most significant to me is the underlying value upon which this approach is based:

"[O]rdinary men and women were incapable of rational thought. For *democracy* to work effectively, public opinion needed to be guided by what historian Robert Westbrook has characterized as “enlightened and responsible elites.”

...[T]o exert control over the social order in a *democratic* age a “small intellectual aristocracy,” adept in the application of mass psychology, was essential.

Thus, the foundational value is actually the unequalness of peoples. This is the exact antithesis of the foundational value of democracy, which is the equal value of all peoples.

...We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, ...

Thus Bernays and his ilk use this rhetorical mechanism to propagate anti-democratic values under the pretext of "managing democracy."

2) Bernays and others, went about developing the techniques that could be used by the intellectual aristocracy to guide the thinking of the masses. His writing is framed in terms of scientific inquiry and its masters, "public relations practitioners."

This science was based on understanding the "machinery of the ordianry person's mind."

For Edward Bernays, ... provided a psychic architecture that a public relations practitioner needed to understand in great depth--[A] thorough comprehension of the unconscious and instinctual triggers that stimulate human behavior.

One of the most powerful instinctual forces was the "herd instinct" -- the imperative each individual feels to fit in.

And, the herd could be directed into a particular groove and it was the role of the opinion leaders to define for the public what the "conversation of the day" would be.

Evoking a metaphor inspired by the recent invention of the phonograph, .... “the conversations of individuals … are forced to follow the groove of borrowed thoughts. One pen [in the media] suffices to set off a million tongues.”

In addition to the metaphor of the groove of a phonograph record, he also used the metaphor of train tracks.

Bernays described ... “mediums … through which public attention is reached and channeled .... newspapers, magazines ... word-of-mouth networks [directed by] individuals whose opinions influence the outlooks of others. [These are the] railroad tracks along which ideas and opinions travel.

Essential to guiding individual conversations into "the groove of borrowed thought," is the newspaper.

The pressunifies and invigorates conversations … every morning the newspapers give their public the conversations of the day … This increasing similarity of simultaneous conversations in an ever more vast geographic domain is one of the most important characteristics of our time.

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Cheryl Attkinsson recently talked about the increasingly "artificial paid-for news" that we are being fed and the use of the imperative to fit-in-with-the-herd to pressure other's thinking.

“Astroturf seeks to manipulate you into changing your opinion by making it seem as if you’re an outlier–when you’re not.”
“Hallmarks of astroturf and propaganda include use of inflammatory language such as quack, crank, nutty, pseudo, paranoid and conspiracy. Beware when an interest addresses an issue by controversializing or attacking the people, personalities and organizations surrounding the issue...

And

A smear artist told me that nearly every image that crosses your path on a daily basiswhether it’s on the news, on a billboard or on a late night comedy show. All of it was put there for a reason, often by someone who paid a lot of money for it to be there.”

old-fashioned entrainment

SP that's a great writeup on Bernays. I haven't read it, but you make me want to do so.
Entrainment technology, done the old-fashioned way - using our biology against us.
Awareness is really the only answer here.

Reading material/awareness material

Thanks SP for the nice book report. I'm going to acquire that book for my next read. Several years ago I terminated my subscripitions to newspapers, TV and so on to curb the extranoeus input. One of the first things I noticed was that I was much happier having eliminated the 'triggers' which came from my natural reactions to the 'news'.
Being 'current' with what is happening in the world and living a life on a road less travelled is somewhat like negotiating a minefield. Constant awareness of one's surroundings and time out to tend the garden is a lifelong balancing act.
Coop